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3-Month-Old Community & Traffic?

I am just curious as of how well our site is doing in comparison to others out there around the same age. Obviously there are several varying factors at play, but for the sake of time I will keep it simple and brief.

We launched a new site [new domain] running vBulletin nearly three months ago on December 11, 2001. With absolutely ‘NO’ advertising whatsoever [not ever search engine submission] we already have claimed 109 members, 205 threads and more than 2200 posts. The hits average around 7500 a day… But often peaking around 13k.

I was hoping someone could confirm my sense of success…? Is this a low figure? High volume? Ive never created a 'community' site before and was simply curious.

That's a lot of hits - how do you count those hits? My forums get about 60 or 70 visitors per day , and has about 117 members - it has been up since exactly one year ago, although I haven't really spent any time or money promoting it.

To give us a better idea of your forum's efficiency, please describe your subject matter and target audience. If you were aiming at a general (non-technical) audience, I would have expected you to have more members by now.

As silly as this sounds, I am not at liberty to discuss content or details. I am obtaining a registered trademark and registered copyright on the idea... Which probably isn't necessary, but just to be safe... Yada Yada Yada. I know, it is annoying.

Anyway, without breaking confidentiality, the site is controversial in matter concerning my local town. Very targeted and considering the population is only 9254, I figured the hits were awesome. But, I didn't know if I was patting myself on the back fairly or not... Figured I would ask.

As for hits... I received around 250,000 last month [February] and served up nearly 60,000 banner impressions. The problem of this is uniques... not many! Again, small town targeted... So, what do I expect, eh? And the ONLY form of advertisement is 'word of mouth'. Which if nothing else is cheap!

My forum stats

Started date: 10-30-2001, but the site had started 15 days before on 10-15-2001, using XMB forum, then I switched to vB. So it's about 5 months old. Absolutely no advertising at all, traffic come from world of mouth, but I was lucky to have 5 die-hard mods, they email to many of their friend and *post whoring* like crazy in the first month .

wtf! how does everyone get such great results, i thought building a community took time. My forum is a little over a year old and we only got 800 members and 22k posts and around 2000 hits a day. I promote like crazy!

Number of members don't matter: If you want to get lots of member, close the forum to guest like honda-acura.net, but this is a cheap way to get member, so don't worry if you don't have many members, the things if they like your forum, you'll get tons of registered users sooner or later.

Here are things that worked for me:

- Everybody knows that content is King. Don't try to promote but devote your time into making the site more interested to users, they will do world-of-mounth promote your site free. My site increase from average of 300 posts to 1000 posts everyday within this month. Average new users has been increased from 5 to 10-15.

- Simplicity, if you site are new, don't create 10-20 empty forums in the beginning. This will make the site looks bored and your users have to click more. Create the max of 6 categories at the beginning, you can always create it later.

- Simplicity again, make register page as SHORT as possible. Every vbulletin forum I've visited keep the default one, eventhough the required fields are only 5, it's still confused, result? I click close immediately because it takes too much time. If they want to do fancy stuff like sig, avatar or whatever, they can do it in their CP, my register page only ask for username, password and emails.

- Helpful to your member, answer their question, participate and be mature.

I don't mean to be teachie or , my site is not big either, but it growing at reasonable rate.